“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”

“Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. & just as all hands are basically the same - form follows function - all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.”

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.”

“When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.”

“Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,' it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the proch steps after her. 'The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women...rape all the men...and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!”

“How many have to die before we will give up these dangerous toys?”

“Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and the narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.”